A Thrilling Challenge

Helen Brown in The Telegraph looks at the explosion of interest in the West in literature from China and lists some good reads.

However, literary agent Toby Eady sees the linguistic problem as the most serious barrier to Chinese fiction reaching the West :

How do we cross into Chinese as a language and as a way of thinking? There is but one way and that is literacy, an understanding of China through its history rather than a Western view of China's history. Good translation takes a long time, and cooperation between the author and translator. Few publishers have that time.